Rita Wong’s forage is a lament against a culture of mass consumerism inherited to today’s generation. Wong breaks ground with her stark honesty and refreshing rhythm, style and contemporary dialog. Hailed by Dionne Brand, winner of the Governor General’s Award for Poetry, as “trenchant, tender, urgent, fevered and wise,” Brand goes on to say that “…Wong’s forage is an ecoindictment; a harmolodic for the bruised planet.”
Like the title suggests, the poems in forage address the
ravaging of the planet and humanity by abusive powers. Wong’s discourse situates itself on modern international political planes, but leaves space for humour, beauty and resilience to shine within this burning global landscape. forage confronts our current “value chain” in relation to such colossal topics as patriotism, environmental issues, race and gender roles, history, media, food, housing, addiction and the
unsubstantiated accumulation of waste.
Wong intersperses the pages of forage with clever wordplay and frames her poems with evocative marginalia, Chinese characters and quotes from influential cultural icons. forage sings a song of “skeptical love in a body politic with revolt” through “the corridors of power noisy with mistakes” (stance). In the words of Shani Mootoo, “this little book of poems leads the literary wing of the 21st century’s people’s revolution” and is a vivid, fierce commentary on our international political landscape and the injustices it breeds.
Rita Wong’s first book, monkeypuzzle, was published by Press Gang in 1998 and received the Asian Canadian Writer’s Workshop Emerging Writer Award. She is a visiting instructor at the University of Miami and teaches Critical and Cultural Studies at the Emily Carr Institute in Vancouver, BC. |
